After going through my first death meditation, I wondered whether the experience was a hallucination. I don’t recall ever having anything that elaborate happen in a daydream. And my normal sleeping dreams are never that organized. I felt like I had been hypnotized into a near-death experience.

Someone asked the mystic about their personal experience during the death meditation wanting to know the same thing. The mystic then explained the difference between a realization and a hallucination. “If it was a realization, then awareness will spread throughout your life,” he said. “But, if in your physical reality you become more and more senseless because of what you’ve seen, then it was clearly a hallucination.” He went on to say that people who try to see something during a meditation, will often have hallucinations. I don’t recall having any expectations before the death meditation. I went into the process completely open and had no idea what to expect.

I can say that as a result of the process, my awareness did change. For several days after the process, I began to sense a small tornado-bathed-in-light inside of people with whom I came in contact. There was nothing visible that my eyes could actually see, but I seemed to intuitively sense the spinning light vortex that stretched from their throats down to their stomachs. It may have just been my imagination, but when I first noticed it, it startled me. I began to believe that this vortex as the divinity within us all, a passage between the physical universe and the non-physical.

The evening after the death meditation process, I sketched out some notes and a diagram, so that I would remember what I had seen. There were about ten of us crammed into a small cabin, but I sketched away while sitting in my top bunk with the help of a flashlight. The diagram I drew showed the spinning galaxy with what I now felt was a black hole at the center. I labeled the black circle in my diagram, “Tornado-bathed-in-light.” I then drew an arrow out of the black circle to a mass of tiny dots, next to which I wrote, “Like TV Snow.” I then drew a 3-D array of circles, each one peppered with little dots and swirls to depict the stars and galaxies that were inside each one. I then drew zigzag arrows moving through the circles to depict the life energies I had seen flashing through like lightning bolts. Next to these circles I wrote, “Forms a Structure of Something Larger.” I had not really thought about that last note until I was sketching the diagram. As I was recalling the vision, I had the sudden realization that the circles were like atoms that created some other grand form. I had no idea what that form was, or if there was some type of loop involved. For example, the circles could be the atoms that make up your own body, but that idea was not part of the original experience.

I was not able to sleep that night after the death meditation, because my energy level was so elevated. I wasn’t tired, but I rested my body while my mind repeated the experience over and over. I thought about the circles, which the presence there had referred to as “eggs,” and which I now referred to as “basketballs” because of their size. Each basketball seemed to be individualized instances of the universe. Each person had their own little universe, and they blinked in and out of existence billions of time a second. The life energy of a person jumped from one basketball to another, which I interpreted as moving from one instance of “now” to another. There were endless basketballs there for everything that had ever happened in the past. There were also basketballs already there for potential future events. As I lay on my bunk thinking about it, I realized that many of those potential future basketballs were never used. They were possible futures that might happen, but for some reason or another did not occur.

I recalled the way the life energy lightning bolts moved along a straight path for few basketballs and then took a sudden 90-degree turn. You would think that a particular energy would continue in the same direction, and if you could study that future potential circular universe, you would be able to predict a person’s future. But those twists and turns taken by the energies seemed to dodge those expected events and blaze their own unique paths. Perhaps this was the nature of freewill, the wildcard the creator had thrown into the equation.

The next day, the mystic was taking questions from the participants and someone asked how he knew so much about everything. I thought the mystic’s answer specifically applied to the basketball universes I had seen.

“Do you have all of this knowing inside of you?” a young woman asked, “Or are you getting it from somewhere?”

“Karma can be recorded in your memories, sensations, your physiology, and in your energy,” the mystic explained. “It is the same for knowledge. For example, after you’ve learned to ride a bicycle, you can jump on a bike and just ride. You don’t have to remember how. You just seem to know how. The memory of how to ride a bicycle is now in your body instead of your mind.”

“All of the things that I know, just come to me in a moment,” he continued. “I don’t carry any of this knowledge with me. You would be surprised. If you are with me for a period of time you would see that I don’t know anything, but if someone asks me a question about life, I know everything. It does not come from my memory. It is transmitted as energy.”

“It is similar to the way information is stored on computer chips,” the mystic explained. “What used to be thousands of pages of paper can now be stored on a tiny chip. A million books can be stored as energy. Your energy system is similar. It can carry volumes without it being a burden to you.”

“Is everything that happens recorded in this energy system?” the woman asked.

“It is not that everything we say or do is recorded,” the mystic explained. “It is life that is recorded all of the time, everywhere. It does not have to be recorded; it has always been there.”

That last answer is what intrigued me. It has always been there. That’s what I saw when I looked at the basketball universes. The past and the future instances of the universe were all there all the time. If the mystic had access to this place, he could easily know about anything that had ever happened or might happen.